For Those Who Deeply Love Jesus

[MrFarFromRight]

As i said, nice try on trying to turn it around on me but you are still an Atheist Christian bashing in a thread called "For Those Who Deeply Love Jesus". Carry on, you're simply proving my point.

Your absolute ignorance, bad manners, prejudice, and refusal to take in what anybody else is saying is not incredible... because I have seen it all too often. It is not exclusive to religious cranks, but it is a typical tactic of a sort of religious bigot who is incapable of polite and reasoned debate.

For you, the mere fact that I am not a Christian and criticise Christians of YOUR boorishness (people who hide their shallowness, stupidity, hard-heartedness, and intolerance behind a shield which you LABEL with the name of a teacher that I admire) makes me a Christian-basher.

ANYBODY who criticises anything about you is a Christian-basher, I suppose.

Nothing I say is going to change that. You just keep repeating your arrogant mantra of "nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try... "

If that's your idea of "Deeply Loving Jesus", I feel sorry for Jesus.

I will continue to look in on this thread, because SOME people are using it to say interesting things. I have nothing further to say to YOU - neither here nor on any other thread - because you have proved yourself incapable of listening. Don't bother replying to this post, as I'm not going to waste my time reading anything you have to say. It's been a waste of time this far, and I don't expect you to improve your atrocious behaviour.

 

[MightyMax]

Your absolute ignorance, bad manners, prejudice, and refusal to take in what anybody else is saying is not incredible... because I have seen it all too often. It is not exclusive to religious cranks, but it is a typical tactic of a sort of religious bigot who is incapable of polite and reasoned debate.

For you, the mere fact that I am not a Christian and criticise Christians of YOUR boorishness (people who hide their shallowness, stupidity, hard-heartedness, and intolerance behind a shield which you LABEL with the name of a teacher that I admire) makes me a Christian-basher.

ANYBODY who criticises anything about you is a Christian-basher, I suppose.

Nothing I say is going to change that. You just keep repeating your arrogant mantra of "nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try nice try... "

If that's your idea of "Deeply Loving Jesus", I feel sorry for Jesus.

I will continue to look in on this thread, because SOME people are using it to say interesting things. I have nothing further to say to YOU - neither here nor on any other thread - because you have proved yourself incapable of listening. Don't bother replying to this post, as I'm not going to waste my time reading anything you have to say. It's been a waste of time this far, and I don't expect you to improve your atrocious behaviour.

I'm not a Christian. I have no idea if Jesus existed, let alone feeling any sort of deep love for him. It's highly ridiculous that you are clearly in a thread where you have no need to be desperately trying to enforce your views on others, yet trying to turn it around on me. Keep going. It's clear to everyone who has the issue here.

 

[MightyMax]

Re:


I cannot, and will not, forbid anyone from posting on this thread who wants to post on this thread. I stand by all I wrote in my original post. I ask that those who post play nice, but, I know that "play nice" can be interpreted in quite a range of different ways, so, I can only hope that things will be nicer on this thread than perhaps they would on some other thread.

Well, I'd say you failed there. It isn't your fault though, some people just have to enforce their views on everyone else.

 

[kdt26417]

I have no interest in determining whose fault it is. Each participant (including myself) will have to be their own judge of how their posts affect the thread. I suppose if things get bad enough, the mods will intervene. Since that hasn't yet happened, I suppose we are just seeing some sparks fly.

 

[JaneQSmythe]

...
I am not an atheist. I have my own spiritual gnosis and practices. They differ from orthodox Christianity, but they work for me. My feeling is "all is god, or nothing is."

For me, God is not a separate entity. God is in me, in you, in every human, animal, plant and rock, and in endless reaches of space above and around us....

I am a "little a" agnostic...I have nothing against Jesus (or Buddha or Muhammad or any other prophet that advocates tolerance and charity) but I, personally, can't "believe" in anything that can't be tested...NOT saying that it isn't "true" - just that I have no "faith" that it is.

As a result of this thread (and other conversations) I have been contemplating how I will respond when my sister's and friends's children eventually (inevitably) ask my about my relationship with God/Jesus/the church etc. An interesting exercise...

If "God is Love" then anyone with "love" in their heart then has God in their heart? So Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land "Thou art God" resonates with me. The bible school song "A church is not a building, A church is not a steeple, A church is not a meeting place, A church is the people." also resonates. The world is my church for now. "Right action, right thought." also resonates - regardless of the motivation.

Much to contemplate...but I don't find my ideas at odds with Jesus' teachings, but often at odds with "organized religion" (which MrS abhors, but I am indifferent to - having seen the good AND bad that results from adherence to a rigid philosophy).

 

[kdt26417]

Re:

"I have been contemplating how I will respond when my sister's and friends' children eventually (inevitably) ask my about my relationship with God/Jesus/the church etc."

I believe I would just say, "I'm an atheist," and be willing to answer any further questions. That's me anyway.

 

[MrFarFromRight]

As a result of this thread (and other conversations) I have been contemplating how I will respond when my sister's and friends's children eventually (inevitably) ask my about my relationship with God/Jesus/the church etc. An interesting exercise...

I LIKE the rest of your comment, but this is the bit that I wanted to reply to.

It partly depends on how honest you want to be, how your sister and friends feel about your being honest, and other factors.

I had the 8-year-old son of a fundamentalist Christian brother (who had already told his 13 children that they weren't to be alone with me... AFTER I had promised all my siblings not to "unconvert" ANY of my nieces and nephews) browbeating me to tell him just WHY I wasn't a Christian.

I answered: "I have no intention of lying to you*. But if I told you the truth, your parents would be upset at me. So could we just drop the subject?" [No: he couldn't, although his 9-year-old sister was telling him to leave me alone.]

I walked away.

REASONABLE Christians would accept that you tell their children that you don't share their faith. Children SHOULD grow up knowing that we don't all agree on everything, that faith is a very personal thing, and that we should respect the other person's right to believe whatever they want.

* I also had no intention of glossing over the subject. I DO believe in being honest with children. And a superficial explanation would be lying by omission.

 

[MrFarFromRight]

Re:

"I have been contemplating how I will respond when my sister's and friends' children eventually (inevitably) ask my about my relationship with God/Jesus/the church etc."

I believe I would just say, "I'm an atheist," and be willing to answer any further questions. That's me anyway.

From everything that I've read of yours, I gather that you're NOT an atheist. An atheist KNOWS that there's no God. An agnostic isn't sure.

Be careful with your terms.

 

[JaneQSmythe]

I am a "little a" agnostic...I have nothing against Jesus (or Buddha or Muhammad or any other prophet that advocates tolerance and charity) but I, personally, can't "believe" in anything that can't be tested...NOT saying that it isn't "true" - just that I have no "faith" that it is.

As a result of this thread (and other conversations) I have been contemplating how I will respond when my sister's and friends's children eventually (inevitably) ask my about my relationship with God/Jesus/the church etc. An interesting exercise...
.

I believe I would just say, "I'm an atheist," and be willing to answer any further questions. That's me anyway.

...
It partly depends on how honest you want to be, how your sister and friends feel about your being honest, and other factors.

* I also had no intention of glossing over the subject. I DO believe in being honest with children. And a superficial explanation would be lying by omission.

From everything that I've read of yours, I gather that you're NOT an atheist. An atheist KNOWS that there's no God. An agnostic isn't sure.

Be careful with your terms.

See, that is the thing - I DO want to be honest with my family/friends' kid(s)...and I consider myself "agnostic" rather than "athiest" because I DON'T KNOW (i.e. "don't believe") anything...

I want to be able to describe my (non-)relationship with "their God" in terms that are age-appropriate rather than just giving them more vocabulary terms.

For the record, I think that my friends/family would be perfectly content with any answer that I give as long as I am not trying to tell them that their parents are "wrong" (which I wouldn't do, since I don't have a similar conviction that my suspicions/preferences are "right"). So this is mostly an internal struggle about a hypothetical situation.

 

[kdt26417]

Re (from MrFarFromRight):

"From everything that I've read of yours, I gather that you're *not* an atheist. An atheist *knows* that there's no God. An agnostic isn't sure."

Heh, ya got me. Technically I am an agnostic. I hold out about a 1% chance that God exists. So, I always used to tell people I was agnostic.

What happened is, I chanced across a bit of writing one time that said something like, if you hold out very little chance of God existing, it is a kind of wishful thinking to call yourself an agnostic. Technically you don't *know* the Sun will rise in the morning, but you are sure enough that it seems silly to say you're not sure.

I thought whoever wrote that was onto something. So, that's when I decided to adopt the atheist label and own it. Even though I'll admit to my 1% of belief readily enough.

I do have one friend who's 100% atheist. I always enjoy his writings.

Re (from JaneQSmythe):

"I want to be able to describe my (non-)relationship with 'their God' in terms that are age-appropriate rather than just giving them more vocabulary terms."

This is the part where they'd ask, "What's atheist," and I'd say, "I mostly believe there's no such thing as a God." And again I'd pause, waiting to see if they have more questions for me (like "Why" ... muahahahaha ...)

I want to add, the God I believe in 1% is very different from the anthropomorphic male God of LDS canon. Although I stop shy of believing in a God who is a sort of mass oneness that we'll all merge back into when this life is over. I'm too individualistic to think that. I think of God as a being who's advanced much further than you and I, who can take any form xe wants and that's of minor import. I don't even think that God is infinitely advanced in every way ... a bit of my Mormon background leaking through.

But, my belief in God and other things being the way the Mormon church describes, is about 0.00000001%. Same (or about the same) with my amount of belief of the Catholic God ... etc.